Alpha, beta, gamma – or why Safari 3 should be Alpha

As you know Safari 3 is now beta and available for both Mac OS and Windows platform. However, it seems that Apple underestimated the development state of the Windows version. Developing software is like respecting the alphabet order, no letter (or phase) should be skipped. Apple should have thought twice about that before releasing there public beta of Safari 3 for Windows. It is hardly beta software.

The biggest problem with the new release is the rendering. Some sites are hardly usable because many information are not displayed and sometimes this information was the only way to access some part of a site. Check both screen-shot below.

Furthermore, I wanted to quickly check if Safari was faster or more efficient than the concurrence. I did a brief comparison of navigating with multiple tabs and performing the same browsing with Safari, Opera and Firefox. This test is completely unscientific. Anyway, I have obtained the following results under Windows XP SP2. The reported time and the amount of memory are what the Task Manager is reporting for CPU utilisation and memory usage.

Firefox: 29 sec, 62 MB

Safari: 23 sec, 63 MB

Opera: 22 sec, 43 MB

Regarding CPU consumption Safari and Opera are quite similar. Firefox consumed a bit more, but I did not disable my extensions. The memory footprint is similar on Safari and Firefox (included a few extensions), whereas on Opera its footprint is rather small compare to the others. As for the perceived speed, I would say that Opera wins when it comes to going back to the previous page. For the rest, they all seem equal.

If you are interested in installing Opera on Ubuntu, I would advise you read my previous article about Opera.

One Reply to “Alpha, beta, gamma – or why Safari 3 should be Alpha”

I have tested the new update Safari 3.0.2b which was out today. The rendering seems to be correct on all the web site I have visited.
Safari seems a bit slow to start, but loading web pages feels snappy.
This can be considered a decent beta release